Because most of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck had been published previously through various outlets, one of Adichie's main jobs in compiling the book would have been the decision of the order of the stories. I think she chose perfectly in placing "The Headstrong Historian" as the final chapter.
To me, the story is the most encapsulating of the themes in all the rest. Focusing on the relationship between Nigeria and the West, "The Headstrong Historian" covers the emerging influence of the Christian world on 19th and 20th century Africa. And in doing this over three generations, the reader gains a new perspective on the erosion and subsequent refocus on native African culture. The chapter also covers the hardships that girls and women faced in tribal and rural Africa, a theme that the book covered through many different time periods and locations. And despite the setting of the chapter being a place and time so foreign to me in Annapolis in 2016, it had something intensely relatable and human about it. Nwamgba's heartbreak and refusal to remarry after her husband's sudden death, her simultaneous pride and fear in her son's growing knowledge of the ways of the white men, and Afamefuna's maturation and realization of who she truly wanted to be; Adichie makes the progression of the family over nearly a century so real to the reader that when Afamefuna took back her heritage and changed her name, I pridefully smiled as if she were my own.
Adichie's greatest quality is that in every chapter, she creates characters that are tangible and human in their self-doubt, fear, and pain. Unfortunately, I've finished the book now and have no more of her powerful stories to delve into.
